>>One quick way to teach them about life is a marksmanship and gun safety course, and then a piece of hardware strapped to their waists. If a maniac charges through the door with a gun and starts picking off their students, they’ll do the right thing. Best part of it is, they probably won’t have to, because visibly wearing a sidearm while on duty deters would-be maniacs.
I know a lot of teachers. They actually see a gun as a thing that makes people become murderers. It is a worldview thing. They’ll tell you, “if I had a gun, I’d be afraid that I’d kill people for taking my parking space.”
Believe me—arming Progs is NOT the answer. The solution is to change the pipeline for teaching. It should not start and end in a classroom with nothing in between. The in-between is why the education system is so messed up.
OK. Can you change the channel for educating teachers by next week? We’ve got a situation now. This stuff keeps happening. If the teachers can’t trust themselves with a gun, you put someone in the classroom who can be trusted. Who’s trained, armed, and ready.
But the teachers who think the gun will make them turn into murderers is suffering from a prejudice, just like my deceased mother-in-law used to be prejudiced against blacks. She never dealt with them, she had heard terrible things about them, and she grew up in the ‘30s and ‘40s, surrounded by people who were likewise ignorant and prejudiced. When, late in life, she got to know some blacks, she exclaimed as if it were a great epiphany: “they’re actually human beings!”
Likewise, this progressive teacher, if she actually gets trained in the use of a gun and is ordered to wear one, fully aware of her awesome responsibility to protect her students, will overcome her long-standing prejudices against an innocent inanimate object.
In Israel, at least one teacher of the entire classroom team comes to class with a sidearm holstered in the small of his back within reach of his dominant hand. Usually it’s a male teacher, but they’re all army veterans, both male and female, so they know how to handle a gun and don’t have this prejudice. Perhaps women don’t like them because of the psychologically suggestive shape. So they defer to men, who do like pistols for the same reason.
But this is not Wally’s Middle School anymore. Any class anywhere can be assaulted by psychos, just as in Israel. Some alternative to managing that reality has got to be implemented, and soon. You can’t just not pass gun control laws simply because they’re idiotic and don’t work. You have to do something proactive. If not the teacher, then somebody else has to be on hand who can put down the next school shooter. Or students can take classes at home on the Internet. Or everyone can go to a hermetically sealed classroom where x-ray machines make them look like skeletons, like in Total Recall. Or, if that’s impossible, everyone can be naked and boys and girls segregated from each other.